Stephen Cannell - Final Victim

Lockwood and Karen had decided to keep track of Malavida's progress by phone, maybe risk a visit once he was conscious. Karen had called the Miami hospital just before they checked out of the Best Western. She'd gotten almost nothing from the floor nurse, who had told her Malavida was out of surgery and listed as critical. "How critical?" Karen had asked.

"Critical critical."

Lockwood had been surprised by the depth of Karen's concern. He was now sure that, during the short amount of time he had been in California, something had started up between them. It annoyed him. Had he been harboring a secret fantasy about Karen? In the wake of Claire's murder, had he been secretly hoping for a shot at Awesome Dawson? He hoped he wasn't that shallow, but he had been surprising himself a lot lately.

Inside the motel room, Karen hooked her modem to the computer and started to check out Leonard Land. There was no criminal record on him in the Federal computer. She cross-referenced with NCIC, the National Crime Information Center. Nothing there either. She punched the name into the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles, including the truck registration number, and up on her screen popped a driver's license picture. Leonard looked slightly different from when he had attacked her. In the picture he seemed wistful, almost pathetic. He was smiling earnestly, his bald head and missing eyebrows not as menacing as in the awful moment when he'd grabbed her outside the house in the wetlands. The address they already had: 2200 Little Manatee Road. The license said he was twenty-seven years old, six feet eleven inches tall, and 367 pounds. No hair, brown eyes. That was it. She downloaded the information and picture, then stored them in her hard drive. She wished Malavida were with them; his dark eyes and dry humor hung with her like a lingering fragrance. She prayed quietly for him. "Please, God, don't let him die," she heard herself whisper.

She turned her mind back to the target. She was pretty sure that Leonard wouldn't go back to his job even if he had one. He was in the wind, hiding someplace, ready to strike from the darkness. Something else was moving restlessly in the back of her mind… a thought or feeling that she couldn't quite capture. Finally she slapped it down. It was a feeling she'd gotten when Leonard grabbed her out in the yard and dragged her into his kitchen. He had held her down on the table, breathing through his mouth. She was looking up into his crazed eyes, and before he hit her with his fist, in that instant she knew that this was about more than just ritualistic homicides. It was about survival. She didn't know how she knew that, but somehow she read it on him or in his eyes.

Karen sat thinking for a minute, then turned back to her computer. She needed to see if she could throw a wider net and get a better VICAP sample with the new specifics she had. She always learned a lot about a killer from studying the victim. Something had drawn Leonard Land to Candice Wilcox and Leslie Bowers… And then she remembered the strange picture that Lockwood had told her about, the one that was in the rusting garbage barge. He had said that the woman's body had been divided into parts with Magic Marker and that each section had been dated. She wondered if Leonard was constructing a woman out of harvested body parts.

She reviewed again what she knew, trying to arrange the facts differently to get a new pattern. Leonard Land was twenty-seven, and thus fit perfectly the mean age for serial murderers who left behind "organized" crime scenes. She knew from her research that most serial criminals began to realize the scope of their hopelessness in their early twenties, and it was at this time that fantasies about striking back began to grow. Around age twenty-five, the anger and depression would get to the point where they could no longer relieve the pressure by the torture or killing of animals. They would then begin to kill people. An organized crime scene indicated a slightly older killer. And two years were usually added to the mean age. Traditionally, a serial murderer killed to relive some specific sick fantasy. The act was often ritualistic in nature. Karen knew that the ritual surrounding the murder rarely changed because it was the ritual that was the real reason for the crime. The ritual drove the act thus creating a pattern that could be used to match other murders. After a serial killing, there was a cooling-off period, which could be anything from less than a week to several years. Then, inevitably, the subject killed again to relieve the pressure, and the whole cycle started over. If the time period between murders shortened, the subject was said to be degenerating, becoming potentially more destructive and more violent, as well as more careless.

Karen sat in the room in Clearwater Beach, listening to the distant surf. Leonard had told his pen pal in the Oslo prn that he mailed totems. She wondered if he used everything that he harvested at the crime scene. He had taken both of Candice Wilcox's arms, both of Leslie Bowers's legs. She wondered if he had discarded anything. She leaned over her keyboard and began to construct a new query. She asked VICAP to list any record of body parts being sent through the mail. She narrowed the request to within a week or two of the dates of Candice's and Leslie's murders. She entered the data, then sat back and waited. Just as she was about to lose hope, she got one bounceback.

The computer showed that a Florida sheriff named Carl Zeno had taken into evidence a severed female hand with the fingertips removed. The hand was at the Tampa Coroner's Office. It had been delivered to a woman on April 13, one day after the murder of Candice Wilcox. The name of the woman who had received the hand was Tashay Roberts, 901 Court Road, Tampa, Florida.

"John," Karen called excitedly, "I got something!"

Sheriff Carl Zeno leaned back in his metal chair and put a dusty boot up on the corner of his desk. He sucked loudly on a toothpick and spun his wide-brimmed Smokey hat insolently on his index finger as he looked at them.

"Tashay, she gets herself in with some pretty strange people," he said, dropping the hat on the desk. "I'm her stepdaddy and that gives me some rights, I spose, but you know how that is… I ain't blood, so I do what I can t'help her mom, Cherise, with her… but it don't always go down the way I want."

They were in the Sheriffs sub-station in Fort Myers, Florida. Karen had shown Zeno her Customs ID and introduced Lockwood as a Customs Inspector. Zeno had written down their names but had not asked to see Lockwood's badge. The office was a five-man cop-shop in a one-story brick building. Yellow linoleum floors, metal desks, and the smells of disinfectant and tobacco smoke completed the ambience.

Carl Zeno was blond, with a rock-hard handshake and a Sam Brown gun harness stretched tight over a potbelly. He had good-ol'-boy charm that barely hid a nasty disposition.

Karen thought she'd hate to be pulled over by this guy on an empty highway and say the wrong thing.

" 'Course she's got this Bobby Shiff guy she lives with now," he said sneering. "Hosed off and naked, that freak don't weigh a hundred pounds. Tashay, she's real easy on the eyes, but you oughta see Shiff… looks like an extra in a vampire movie. He sings in a Death Metal band called Baby Killer… calls himself Satan T. Bone. Don't y'love that?"

Karen looked over and caught Lockwood's eyes.

Zeno caught the glance. His gaze was lazy and insolent, and there was a small smile playing at the side of his mouth.

"What'd you say your name was again, sugar?"

"You wrote it down. It's right in front of you."

He smiled at her. "We don't get good-lookin' lady cops in this unit. All we got is bats with hats. Got one patrol woman on this shift, looks like Mike Ditka."